Jeff:
Today we are chatting about kind of our biggest theme we always talk about on family teams, but in a specific way. And that is how to improve your vision for your family teams. Something that’s deeply, deeply important. I don’t think people give a lot of thought about, and that’s that. That’s having a vision, but then how to improve it, how to think about it. So, yeah Jeremy, what would you say to that?

Jeremy:
Yeah guys, so if you are just trying to build your team and you cannot see the future, you don’t know where you’re headed, or it’s a very low resolution, very fuzzy picture. It’s going to be very difficult for you to aim at that. Stanley Hauerwas, one of me and Jeff’s favorite theologians.

Jeff:
Yeah, he’s awesome.

Jeremy:
He said, “We can only act within the world we can envision,” we can only act within the world that we can envision. So the question is, how do you dial up the resolution on the vision for your family team? And so one basic way to do that is to take some time and do like a writing assignment. So you want to think about 10 years into the future. What do you want to see your family look like? How are they interacting with each other? What are the sibling relationships like?

What are you guys doing for work? What are your rhythms look like? What does your marriage look like? What are all of the kind of missional elements of your family looking like? Even write down things like the ages of your kids, try to dial up that resolution as much as possible, and as you guys do that, that is vision. Vision is a basic. The basic idea vision is seeing into the future, being able to see that ideal future so that you have something to aim at. And the point is you guys, not that you’re going to hit it perfectly. Not that life’s going to go exactly the way you planned. The point is that you can’t make hard decisions in a short to medium term when you don’t have a longterm vision. And one of the other sort of tips for how to think about this is I’m totally obsessed with movies that I feel like helped me get a glimpse for what the life might look like into the future.

And usually I’m not looking for movies that give me a perfect snapshot of my family in 10 years, right? I’m just looking for glimpses. And if you look at a movie like Fiddler on the Roof, it gives you a little glimpses into what arrhythmic life might look like. Lots of misery in that movie, but also amazing glimpses. Or the Godfather, the relationship between Vito and Michael, lots of brokenness in that movie, but glimpses. Or the Incredibles, like all of these different children in the family and the parents all with their unique abilities, but working together as a team. And so as I start to sort of grab those different glimpses from history, from literature, from movies, from things that I’m seeing and people that are upstream from us in terms of their family, I began to piece together and increase the resolution on that 10, 15-year vision. And that is really critical. If you guys are going to aim at something that’s going to really make a difference. You’re going to begin to iterate your way, making decisions to hit that vision. But yeah. Jeff, have you guys thought about this one?

Jeff:
Yeah, I love that. I mean, I immediately even think, not just as a family, but as a Christian, I think this is basically what Jesus lays out to his followers, right? Where he is painting an enormous future vision that actually says, and that future is brought into the present in the here and now in himself. He says, and that’s when he says things like your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And that’s what Auntie Writes says. Things like, Jesus’s job isn’t to pull us out of earth into heaven, but it’s actually to colonize earth with the vision of heaven or the life of heaven. And I think that’s just that similar thing of understanding that that’s what it actually means to be a follower of Jesus is bringing that future vision of fruition, of blessing, of goodness, of the garden image in the city in Jerusalem in Revelation and bring it to the present.

But then even in the microcosm of your family, right? What does it look like to be the kingdom vision of your family, to be the kingdom kind of finish line of where God has for your family and then kind of rip that into the present by acting now, by living as if that’s true now and something that’s super, super important, but yeah, you can’t be a family team without vision.